classical mechanics
Every moment of a science fiction story must represent the triumph of writing over world-building. World-building is dull. World-building literalises the urge to invent. World-building gives an unnecessary permission for acts of writing (indeed, for acts of reading). World-building numbs the reader’s ability to fulfil their part of the
crystallography
In November 2008, Luca Bindi, a curator at the Universita degli Studi di Firenze, Italy, found that the alloy of aluminium and copper called khatyrkite could be a quasicrystal. Bindi couldn’t be sure because he didn’t have the transmission electron microscope necessary to verify his find, so he
Current Science
Dan Shechtman won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 2011. This led to an explosion of interest on the subject of QCs and Shechtman’s travails in getting the theory validated. Numerous publications, from Reuters to The Hindu, published articles and reports. In fact, The Guardian ran an online article
crystallography
Did science journalists find QCs anomalous? Did they report the crisis period as it happened or as an isolated incident? Whether they did or did not will be indicative of Kuhn’s influence on science journalism as well as a reflection of The Structure’s influence on the scientific community.
Dan Shechtman
Dan Shechtman’s discovery of quasi-crystals, henceforth abbreviated as QCs, in 1982 was a landmark achievement that invoked a paradigm-shift in the field of physical chemistry. However, at the time, the discovery faced stiff resistance from the broader scientific community and an eminent chemist of the time. Such things made
